UPCOMING EVENTS

Vungle said it has reached a $300 million run rate for annualized revenues from its performance-based in-app video ad platform. The company also said it is profitable.

San Francisco-based Vungle said that adoption of its software development kit is up 125 percent from the previous year, an indicator that it has good traction in the mobile app and game ads business. Competing with rivals such as AdColony, Vungle is trying to get its unfair share of the $77 billion that’s spent on digital advertising each year, according to market researcher eMarketer.

Vungle also said it has published its mobile advertising benchmarks report today. That report notes that 53 percent of consumers watch video on their smartphones often or sometimes while watching TV. The company says advertisers should take that into account when figuring out where to spend their ad budgets. As advertisers figure out that consumers are spending more time on mobile devices, they are turning to mobile video ad platforms such as Vungle, said Zain Jaffer, the company’s CEO, in an interview.

Vungle said its SDK is now used in 40,000 mobile apps worldwide. Jaffer said that the focus is on performance, so the company gets paid only if a user who views an ad takes an action such as watching a video. That way, advertisers get a measurable return on investment, Jaffer said.

“Once you guarantee an advertiser [the program] is success-based, and we get paid when you get paid, the floodgates open,” Jaffer said. “The clickthrough rates and install rates are much higher.”

Vungle’s revenue has also grown fast in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. In China alone, Vungle grew overall revenue by more than 400 percent since 2015. The company has expanded significantly in APAC, with offices in Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo. One day, China may be the No. 1 territory for the company, based on the results so far, said Jaffer.

“Asia is really important for us as a growth market, and we have a full Asia strategy across all of the countries,” he said.

Above: Consumers are more captive on mobile devices.

Image Credit: Vungle

“Before Vungle, it was very challenging to measure the actual performance of the media we were using and our return on ad spend. Quality of users is more important than just exposing our ads to the same user over and over again,” said Hayley Nam, brand marketing manager at Memebox, a leading Korean beauty ecommerce company. “Vungle provided us with amazingly high-quality users that others just could not deliver.”

In the report, Vungle said that ads created by its in-house division, Vungle Creative Labs, outperform ads created by 73 out of the top 100 highest-spending advertisers by 20 percent or more.

Vungle serves in-app ads on more than 500 million devices. The company is backed by Google Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, and Crosslink Capital.